04.07.02 My Personal Experience as a Value-Adding Businesswoman

My Cosmetics Business

My Personal Experience as a Value-Adding Businesswoman

I had always wanted to do business from a very young age. Thinking back, I must have inherited this from my mother who tried several income generating activities to supplement her salary and my dad’s during those hard times of the civil war that had hit our country for over two decades.

After graduating with my first degree in Agriculture, I got a job as an Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture. It was not long thereafter that my entrepreneurial skills surfaced as I decided to look for a small stand in one of the shops on William Street, which was near my workplace at Amber House by then, and consulted a friend whose bosses were importing cosmetics from the UK. She was so kind as to give me some contacts of wholesalers in the city, where I could get stock to sell to other retailers at a modest profit. Before long, I had dropped my formal job in government to focus on my cosmetics business; and even went ahead to register Bethels Ltd. as a sole proprietorship.

My husband joined (then boyfriend) thereafter, bringing in his valuable experience of managing a business in the busy city. Unlike myself, a university-bred girl who had attended a missionary school, Gayaza, from primary to secondary, he knew his way around the capital, courtesy of the Senegalese mogul whose business he had been managing.

One thing we shared in common was our passionate search for God, and as already said, we got saved in February 1985 and wedded in December that same year. It was thereafter that God connected us to importers of cosmetics from the UK, and it only took a few months before we started flying to the UK ourselves.